The complexities of enabling OpenCL support

Hello, and welcome back to FOSS Fridays! One of the final preparations for the release of Adélie Linux 1.0-beta6 has been updating the graphical stack to support Wayland and the latest advancements in Linux graphics. This includes updating Mesa 3D. It’s been quite exciting doing the enablement work and seeing Wayfire and Sway running on a wide variety of computers in the Lab. And as part of our effort towards enabling Wayland everywhere, we have added a lot of support for Vulkan and SPIR-V. This has the side-effect of allowing us to build Mesa’s OpenCL support as well.

With Adélie Linux, as with every project we work on at WTI, we are proud to do our very best to offer the same feature set across all of our supported platforms. When we enable a feature, we work hard to enable it everywhere. Since OpenCL is now force-enabled by the Intel “Iris” Gallium driver, in addition to the Vulkan driver, I set off to ensure it was enabled everywhere.

Mesa’s OpenCL support requires libclc, which is an LLVM plugin for OpenCL. This library in turn requires SPIRV-LLVM-Translator, which allows one to translate between LLVM IR and SPIR-V binaries. The Translator uses the familiar Lit test suite, like other components of LLVM. Unfortunately, there were a significant number of test failures on 64-bit PowerPC (big endian):

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